The present invention generally relates to backplanes of electronic systems, and more specifically, to a backplane that is capable of handling wireless data transfers.
Complex electronic systems, like data communication systems, typically comprise multiple functional modules that are required to pass large amounts of data amongst each other. Such systems usually employ a dedicated common interconnection element into which all the functional modules plug in. This interconnection element is sometimes called backplane or motherboard.
The backplane of an electronic system provides, among other functions, one or more data buses for passing data between the functional modules. These data buses may be parallel or serial, point-to-point, point-to-multi-point, or multipoint-to-multipoint. These data buses usually include a number of electrical signal transmission lines. During their design, great efforts are made to come as close as possible to perfect uniformity and stability of their transmission parameters and to avoid undesirable reflections of the signal energy from the hard-to-avoid points of discontinuity along the lines and at their ends.
The higher the required data transfer rate, the more difficult it is to achieve the signal integrity required to guarantee the robustness of the data transfer. The high performance interconnect components, like connectors and printed circuit boards are progressively more expensive. Yet, despite their high price, these components continue to have problems reaching the desirable data transfer bandwidth.
Efforts have been made to develop interconnect elements based on data transfer by means other than electrical signal transmission lines. These interconnect elements include, for example, backplanes employing optical signals carrying data through elements of fiber optics and millimeter-wave based wireless interconnection of electronic components. While these interconnect elements have been somewhat successful in achieving higher data rates, they require either very high-precision components, like the fiber optic elements, or highly complex components, like the millimeter-wave transceivers. These high-precision and highly complex components are very expensive thus keeping the cost of developing and manufacturing of interconnect elements quite high.
The millimeter-wave wireless interconnect solution is based on the traditional carrier signal modulation and required complex and, therefore, expensive heterodyne receivers. Furthermore, using discrete frequency carrier signals with relatively high spectral power density made the requirement of low electromagnetic interference caused by such systems hard to satisfy. As a result, such systems never became wide spread.
Hence, it would be desirable to provide a backplane for electronic systems that is capable of achieving high data transfer rates and yet is low cost.